THE RELUCTANT SHERIFF

The fourth in Offutt’s Mick Hardin series is another quick-paced, quick-witted, twisty winner.

The draftee lawman is of course former Army investigator Mick Hardin, his hopes for rural Kentucky retirement thwarted again: He’s pressed into service while his sister, the sheriff, recovers from a gunshot wound. His first call (gloriously) is a domestic incident that takes him to a backyard yurt where he tries a tarot-reader’s kombucha and dispenses justice with a side of horse sense. Then a bar owner whose tavern sits astride the boundary between the town of Rocksalt and county jurisdiction is murdered, shot three times. It seems that Mick has dodged this one: The corpse sprawls in the parking lot, which lies inside the town line, and he works for the county. But he’s drawn in when his ex-wife, irresistible still despite everything, asks him to intervene; the accused, who argued with the bar owner hours earlier, is the man she left Mick for—and now father to her two kids. Alongside the quickly proliferating complications of that case and a second double killing that seems related, Offutt intersperses chapters catching up with ex-deputy Johnny Boy Tolliver, whom Mick has sent into secret exile on Corsica to recover from the trauma that ended the previous book, Code of the Hills (2023). With aid from a mysterious and dangerous ally of Mick’s, the unworldly Kentucky-boy expat adjusts to life in foreign climes—and finds that Corsica and the Appalachian hills have more in common than he’d have guessed. The book’s final quarter has too much violent, standard mayhem, but for the most part this novel is another propulsive delight, with indelible characters, crisp dialogue, and Offutt’s usual masterful command of his setting and of the folkways and thinking of the people who live there.

More delightful, sun-dappled Kentucky noir.